Changing channels: Live chat takes the lead in the latest Zendesk Benchmark report

The headline gave it away, but before reading that, would you have guessed that live chat is the customer service channel with the highest customer satisfaction rate? That’s just one of many goodies in the latest Zendesk Benchmark report, released today.

In the report—which covers the first quarter of 2015—we explored our live chat data for the first time. In addition to creating some new benchmark metrics for live chat, we investigated different aspects of the live chat customer experience to find out what makes it so great. We hope the report helps companies measure their performance and implement best practices on a channel that is quickly rising in consumer popularity.

New live chat benchmark metrics and best practices
One of the most interesting discoveries was that consumers simply love chat. In Q1 2015, live chat led all other channels in customer satisfaction at 92%. Live chat even trumped voice, which came in second at 88%.

We were surprised to see that the more messages a customer and agent exchanged during a live chat conversation, the happier the customers turned out to be. Why? It could be that people simply crave human interaction when they engage with a company rather than an automated transaction, which is so common today (no robots!).

The Q1 Benchmark report is full of more interesting details on chat, like:

How long does an average chat conversation last?

Which country handles the highest volume of chats?

Which industry is the fastest to reply to incoming chats?

What factors are correlated with live chat customer satisfaction?

The answers to these—and many other burning questions about live chat—are in our latest Benchmark report. Happy chatting!